Ms. Davis Goes To Washington, Criticizes Obamacare Rollout

Despite criticisms from Republicans, Democratic candidate for governor Wendy Davis is spending time in Washington D.C. next week for a major fundraising dinner.

The event Davis has been asked to speak at is to be hosted by the groups Battleground Texas and the Lone Start Project. Immediately upon its announcement, Davis began catching heat from her Republican rival, Attorney General Greg Abbott, who in a campaign email said Davis is “trying to bring Obama-styled politics and policies to Texas.”

The Abbott email also criticized Davis’s campaign for accepting money from Washington liberals. Professor Jim Henson, who heads up the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, says Davis’s fundraising efforts outside of Texas fall into an established pattern for Democrats.

“It’s part and parcel for where the Democrats are right now in Texas,” Henson says. “Senator Davis starts with a pretty serious financial disadvantage in the general election. It’s going to be hard to catch up, and catching up is going to mean dragging the sack outside the state.”

Henson says that opens her up for criticism from the Abbott campaign, and predicts the campaign tactic will continue to be a running theme through the general election, one for which he says there is very little defense.

Davis Criticizes Obamacare Rollout

Meanwhile, Davis is calling problems with the online rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s inexcusable.

She’s quoted in the “Dallas Morning News” saying she was troubled by disastrous computer glitches during the first month of the Affordable Care Act’s rollout and that she worries people who are trying to participate will give up because of the problems with the site. Professor Cal Jillson, who teaches political science at SMU in Dallas, says as a Democrat, Davis has to recognize the problems with the roll out of Obamacare, but politically must pivot to a description of the benefits of the plan.

From the Texas Republican perspective, Jillson says the GOP must infect people with the sense that problems with the rollout are emblematic of the entire program, that it’s been a catastrophe.

Jillson says the problem with that is that Republican standoffs in Washington regarding the shutdown of the government actually elevated Obamacare at least few percentage points in the minds of voters.